Acta est fabula
by Chaed
Summary: pRE5. Oneshot. Wesker does not take Jill after the fall. AU, character death.


**Because not matter what I do, I just can't seem be able to turn off this drama button.**

**Disclaimer: No. Just no.  
><strong>

**acta est fabula**_  
>so ends the story<em>

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><p>Death sounds like glass breaking.<p>

It's not her scream that will forever stick in the back of his head, because Jill Valentine goes silently.

It's the sound of glass breaking, the sight of shards falling that will be with him from now until the end of days.

The blood runs freely as pieces of window dig into his palms. He leans all his weight onto the sill until he almost looses balance and goes plummeting after her.

There is nothing but the black sea outside of Spencer's castle and its gushing waves hide the two bodies from his view.

He doesn't know how long it takes to break free of the tide's stupefying lullaby. When he takes his hands off the windowsill they sprout blood and glass, a beautiful crimson fountain.

The room has the stench of tomb to it. It screams out death, bids him farewell as he stumbles out the door, knocking Ozwell Spencer's mausoleum shut behind him.

He stops only when his breath comes in wheezes from the ribs he fractured in the fight. There is blood in his mouth, a thick coppery taste. He wonders what Jill Valentine tastes like, with all the salt water she drowned in.

He takes the stairs two at a time. About halfway down he takes them all at once, courtesy of a bruised ankle from an earlier fall.

There's a moment when, sprawled on the floor, he tries to remember where he's going. He couldn't possibly go to the sea, because that way was right out the window. He is not going to his death, because he left the tomb upstairs.

He is running away. The same way he ran from Raccoon - and left her.

Now he runs from the truth – from her.

By the time he reaches the main hall he's a wreck. He can't breath, with all the sobs that take up all his efforts. He can't see either, with all the tears he cries for her. There's bloodloss too, and soreness and fatigue, but he feels he could run forever on the pain of her loss.

He rams into the double doors, pushes them open.

The rain feels like acid on his skin.

He runs to the cliffs. It's a steep climb down to the beach. It turns out to be more of a tumble, really. He trips on the last bit, lands on his knees. They're open already and the jagged stones bite into his flesh.

He doesn't care.

There is something, to his right. The waves hit, roll off it, but it's no stone.

He falls to his knees beside her. Doesn't know how to touch her. Doesn't dare.

She's all broken.

The water around her is red. When it reaches her, it makes red blood bubbles.

Shards impale her body. Her flanks, her thigh. One is lodged deep in her shoulder. In the same shoulder that forces a bone through her skin.

At last he gets over himself and drags her out of water's reach, onto the shore.

She doesn't scream or moan. She's unconscious. He checks her pulse. He's not sure. It could be the raindrops too. Even they are warmer than the skin under his fingers.

Then he notices the blood in her ears. Her jaw has a bend to it it shouldn't have. Coward that he is, he can't go over her entire body.

It couldn't have been a pulse.

Raindrops, for sure.

Nobody survives such a fall.

Suddenly, Chris' head shoots up.

He stands.

Where is he? Where the fuck _is he?_

There is no trace of Albert Wesker on the shore.

The sea kept him.

But did it really?

He sits beside Jill again.

It doesn't matter.

What Albert Wesker took from him is so much more than his death could ever count for.

He activates the emergency signal on his radio. The BSAA will come and get them.

Until then, he lies beside his partner, closes his eyes and lets the rain wash them clean of their sins.

–

When the chopper arrives, he opens his eyes.

Jill doesn't.

Jill will never open her eyes again.

The BSAA medic confirms her death. Tells Chris that she died on impact. It was quick. She didn't have to suffer.

It turns out later, she did not die on impact. The doctors will find blood and water in her lungs. They will agree that the cause of death was not the direct trauma, but the sea that forced her to breath water instead of air. It was a slow and painful death. Drowning.

But Chris doesn't know that yet.

He's transfixed as two men raise her on a stretcher and carry her away, his broken Jill Valentine. As they lift her up, something falls from her grasp.

Chris knows what it is before he has his hands on it.

It's in that moment that his grief turns to anger. To rage.

Sunglasses.

Not a crack.

It's from that moment on that Chris is convinced of Wesker's survival.

There's a deep urge to kill him now, more than ever.

It's the only way to restore balance in his concept of good and evil.

Otherwise Jill would have died for nothing.

A needless sacrifice in a war that will go on forever if Chris doesn't put an end to it.

He crushes the sunglasses in his hand.

The shards dig deep into his palm.

He begins to cry as the chopper lifts into the air and Jill Valentine is gone.

Then he opens his fist and looks at all the blood. At all the glass.

Because this is what Death sounds like.

Like glass breaking.

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><p><em>Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said<br>Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days  
>that are no more, and shall no more return.<br>Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;  
>I stay a little longer, as one stays<br>To cover up the embers that still burn._

_~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_

__**And the next thing you read from me is Horror. I promise. Crude survival-horror.**


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